Critique of rights, personhood, and Maritain — what is sacred in every human being: is the impersonal-and-sacred a defensible alternative to rights talk, or a dangerous abandonment of the modern human-rights achievement?

Simone Weil, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

What is sacred in every human being is not the person, the rights-bearer, the autonomous subject — these are precisely what affliction can strip away.12 The cry that goes up from one who has been afflicted is not the rational protest of the rights-bearing person; it is something deeper, something that knows itself to be wronged before it has any vocabulary for the wrong, and that is the impersonal-and- sacred.3

The political-philosophical apparatus of rights, derived from the personalism Maritain developed in The Person and the Common Good, misidentifies what we owe one another by pegging it to a property — personhood — that can be removed without removing what is sacred. Obligations are prior to rights; what is owed is owed because of what is sacred-and- impersonal in the recipient, not because of the recipient's status as person.45

Sources

  1. The notion of rights, launched across the world in 1789, was by its internal insufficiencies impotent to exercise the function that was given to it. To join together two insufficient notions in speaking of the rights of the person will not get us any farther. What is it that keeps me from poking out his eyes, if I am allowed to do so, and might even find it amusing? What Is Sacred in Every Human Being?
    Chapter Six: What Is Sacred in Every Human Being?, p. 105
  2. The notion of rights, which was launched into the world in 1789, has proved unable, because of its intrinsic inadequacy, to fulfil the role assigned to it. To combine two inadequate notions, by talking about the rights of human personality, will not bring us any further. What is it, exactly, that prevents me from putting that man's eyes out if I am allowed to do so and if it takes my fancy?
    Two Moral Essays, Human Personality and On Human Obligations, pp. 14–15
  3. It is always, in the last of men as in Christ himself, an impersonal protest. There are also many cries of personal protest, but they are unimportant; you may provoke as many of them as you wish without violating anything sacred. > * > * > * > Human Personality > 13 So far from its being his person, what is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him.
    Human Personality, pp. 13–14
  4. But in any case, it is not capable of a tender and divining attention that can discern the significance of this cry. The same thing is the case to a lesser degree for the organizations that imitate, by contamination, the parties, which is to say, when public life is dominated by the competition of the parties; all organizations are included here, including, for example, the unions and even the churches.
    Chapter Six: What Is Sacred in Every Human Being?, p. 107
  5. Everything which has the effect of uprooting a man or of preventing him from becoming rooted is criminal. Any place where the needs of human beings are satisfied can be recognized by the fact that there is a flowering of fraternity, joy, beauty, and happiness. Wherever people are lonely and turned in on themselves, wherever there is sadness or ugliness, there are privations that need remedying.
    Two Moral Essays, Human Personality and On Human Obligations, pp. 13–14

Where the argument is made

  • 'Human Personality' (1942-43) in Selected Essays 1934-1943, in Two Moral Essays, and in Late Philosophical Writings
  • 'Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations' (1943) in Two Moral Essays and Selected Essays
  • The Need for Roots, especially Part One on the needs of the soul
  • 'On the Abolition of All Political Parties' (1943)
  • Letter to a Priest on the relation of the Church to political philosophy

How the argument was received

The 'Human Personality' critique of personalist political philosophy is one of the most heavily contested late positions. Maritain's The Person and the Common Good (1947, drafted in partial response to my critique) defends the personalist tradition and its centrality to modern Catholic social thought. The broader mid-century rights tradition — the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, drafted with Maritain's input — proceeds from the framework I am criticizing. Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the chapter 'The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,' develops a structurally analogous critique. Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer (1995) and the broader bare-life literature take up the impersonal-and-sacred theme. Springsted (Chapters 8-10) reads my position as the retheologization of the political. The position is alive and contested in contemporary political theology and democratic theory.